Following up on my summary of Cohen's Why Not Socialism?. I'll express one objection to Cohen here, though I have others.

Imagine we all go on a camping trip together. We bring our own stuff. Some of us live in groups, sharing our stuff communally within the group. Some of us live alone. We have different preferences and wants. We don’t all subscribe to the same religion or same views about what the good life is.

We have some common facilities. Everyone does his or her part to maintain them. No one free rides. No one takes advantage of anyone else.

When people need something from a stranger, sometimes they’ll offer a trade. They take pride in having something to offer in return. In some cases, people are really unfortunate and having nothing to offer back. In those cases, the strangers pitch in and given people what they need. Everyone ends up being really well off, better off than in any other camping site.

Now, after a while, people begin to act like Marxists. Harry won’t bother catch any fish, because he expects to be fed by others. Leslie and Tommy end up raiding the orchard and eating all the apples. The apple trees die and now no one has apples. Sylvia, who was in charge of the public facilities, starts pushing people around and abusing them. Next thing you know, she murders all the campers with gardens.

The camping trip sure seemed better when people acted like capitalists. Once people started acting like Marxists, it was awful.

I’ll stop my parallel story here. I just want to note that if I were a Marxist, I’d find the story above annoying. The Marxist should say, “You’re not comparing like to like! You’re comparing a somewhat idealized version of one kind of regime to the realistic, and not a particular good version of a different regime. That’s not fair. Compare like to like.”

Yep. Compare like to like—that’s probably what we’d want to do. Compare an ideal version of one form of life to the ideal version of another. Compare a realistic version of one form of life to the realistic version of another. That’s how you’d learn the most about what’s desirable at any given level of idealization. That would be a much more informative and effective way of making an argument than what Cohen does in Why Not Socialism?.